Overlooking Conventions. The Trouble With Linguistic Pragmatism.

Devitt, Michael

ISBN 10: 3030706524 / ISBN 13: 9783030706524

Published by Cham, Springer International Publishing., 2021

About this Item

1st ed. 2021. 1 Online-Ressource(XIII, 326 p. 1 illus.). Gebunden. Versand aus Deutschland / We dispatch from Germany via Air Mail. Einband bestoßen, daher Mängelexemplar gestempelt, sonst sehr guter Zustand. Imperfect copy due to slightly bumped cover, apart from this in very good condition. Stamped. Perspectives in Pragmatics, Philosophy & Psychology, 29. Sprache: Englisch.

Seller Inventory # 36453AB

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Overlooking Conventions. The Trouble With Linguistic Pragmatism.
• Publisher: Cham, Springer International Publishing.
• Publication Date: 2021
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 3030706524
• ISBN 13: 9783030706524
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition: 1st Edition
• Seller catalogs:
  • Philosophie

About this title

Synopsis

This book criticizes the methodology of the recent semantics-pragmatics debate in the theory of language and proposes an alternative. It applies this methodology to argue for a traditional view against a group of “contextualists” and “pragmatists”, including Sperber and Wilson, Bach, Carston, Recanati, Neale, and many others.  The author disagrees with these theorists who hold that the meaning of the sentence in an utterance never, or hardly ever, yields its literal truth-conditional content, even after disambiguation and reference fixing; it needs to be pragmatically supplemented in context.

The standard methodology of this debate is to consult intuitions. The book argues that theories should be tested against linguistic usage. Theoretical distinctions, however intuitive, need to be scientifically motivated. Also we should not be guided by Grice’s “Modified Occam’s Razor”, Ruhl’s “Monosemantic Bias”, or other such strategies for “meaning denialism”. From this novel perspective, the striking examples of context relativity that motivate contextualists and pragmatists typically exemplify semantic rather than pragmatic properties. In particular, polysemous phenomena should typically be treated as semantic ambiguity. The author argues that conventions have been overlooked, that there’s no extensive “semantic underdetermination” and that the new theoretical framework of “truth-conditional pragmatics” is a mistake.

About the Author

Michael Devitt is a Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the Graduate Center of CUNY. He is the author of the following books: Designation (1981); Realism and Truth (1984/1991/1997); Language and Reality (with Kim Sterelny, 1987/1999); Coming to Our Senses (1996); Ignorance of Language (2006); Putting Metaphysics First (2010); Biological Essentialism (forthcoming). He has co-edited (with Richard Hanley) The Blackwell Guide to the Philosophy of Language (2006)